This book lives up to its title, providing dollops of both joy and insight within its pages.
Weisskopf became a world renown physicist who worked with most of the great physicists of the
20th Century. He was a personal assistant to Wolfgang Pauli and Neils Bohr at two points in his
career. On the Manhattan Project he worked closely with the Los Alamos team as the theoretical
physicist. His job was to estimate the effects of the first atomic bomb blast at the Trinity site. He
and Fermi estimated the yield at 7,000 tons of TNT, but Fermi had a plan to gather data during
the blast for a better calculation. He dropped bits of paper during the shock wave and measured
their deflection with a ruler as they fell. "Twenty-thousand pounds," he said matter-of -factly.
Matter of fact, he was exactly correct.

In the movie "Fat Man and Little Boy" Weisskopf was undoubtedly in many of the
scenes, although I did not detect him when I saw the movie. Maybe next time I will pick him out.
"The existence of excited states always points towards an inner structure," he says on page 236.
He refers to the presence of a spectrum as indicative of an inner, though perhaps invisible
structure of an atomic particle. What the quotation made me think of, however, was the
psychological syndrome known as MPD, or Multiple Personality Disorder. The excited states of
an MPD personality are certainly indicative of an inner structure of personalities. Later in
chromodynamics he explains the force between two quarks is at its weakest at close range and
increases with growing distance. This seems like the "marriage force" to me. Not noticeable,
until some separation occurs. From Wolfgang Pauli to Werner Heisenberg to Pope John Paul II,
this physicist got along with the greatest men of this century and helped to create the atomic
bomb and to keep it from ever being used again. Through it all he kept his sense of humor,
remembering Bohr's admonition, "There are some things that are so serious you can only joke
about them."

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